Lightning in a Bottle

Seed Magazine has now posted their fascinating article on the research regarding how we do (or don’t) grow new brain cells from the February issue. I referred to this article in a previous post.

I love it from two entirely different perspectives. First, as an educator, the insight into how our environment hinders or enhances the growth of new brain cells is really powerful. We now have evidence that the kind of learning environment many of us seek for students actually makes a difference in the physical structure of kids’ brains. When we talk about shaping their minds, it’s literal!

Second, as a science-type person, I am fascinated to read about how a researcher with fresh eyes can come in and turn a long-accepted fact (”People do not grow new brain cells”) and turn it on its head. This doesn’t just happen in science - any profession develops a herd mentality, which is why sometimes the most clueless people on any given topic are experts in that field. (Witness the mass delusion of investment experts during the tech bubble, for instance!) I have great respect for the kind of person that can come in and see through the unchallenged assumptions and argue for a radically new vision against long-established thinking.

The question that it brings to mind is this - how do we innoculate ourselves from this kind of group thinking? I hope we can use blogs and the internetworking created through Web 2.0 to help challenge incorrect group-thinking, instead of reinforcing it.

Microsoft and Intel have teamed with three different companies (so far) to roll out their new Ultra-Mobile PC, or UMPC. You can read articles about it here and here, or visit the Origami Project (Microsoft’s code name for it) website.

The devices all have 7-inch touch screens, and use the full version of Windows XP Tablet PC. They also incorporate a new set of software add-ons called Touch Pack that improve the touch interface, including an intriguing onscreen touch keyboard. (Unlike the standard Tablet PC, you can use your fingers or thumbs for touch input, rather than the official stylus.)

This is version 1.0 of the platform, but it sure looks promising to me as an education solution. The apparent price goal is in the $500 range, but these early-adopter models will be more like $1,000 and up. The battery life is too short, too (only around three hours or so). However, if they can get the cost down to the goal and increase the battery life, these could be great classroom devices.

There’s a marketing video that got loose on the Internet before Microsoft intended, and in one part about two-thirds of the way through, a young man is using the device in a wallet-like case, with an optional keyboard in the lower part of the case:

I have to admit it makes my little techie heart go pitty-pat. A much bigger screen than a PDA, but much more portable form factor than a laptop. I hope the product is successful enough to make the transition to classroom use, because education itself isn’t a big enough market to support it. And I hope Microsoft supports its use in classrooms, unlike their approach with Pocket PCs.

I have always been fascinated by animation. When I was a kid, my dad brought back an Elmo 8-millimeter movie camera from Japan, and I was thrilled when I figured out that it had a single-frame advance on it! I made several animations about five seconds long, and on a trip to the ocean set it up on a tripod and spent forty-five minutes capturing a sunset in time-lapse. I thought it was very, very cool, but it was also expensive (that film and developing cost a lot of money), very difficult to view (you had to haul out the projector, set up a screen, thread the film, and so on), and it was, of course, silent. Yes, children, no sound!

Fast forward more years than I care to think about, and it’s a whole new world. I’ve been working with a cool little software package for Macs called iStopmotion from Boinx Software. Using any standard digital video camera, you can create animations or timelapse videos. The animation window has onion skinning, which allows you to see the previous frame as you set up the subsequent image, which is really helpful when you forget just where the arm on your character was before you moved it. It also has a voice control option, so you don’t even need to touch the computer as you move your clay blob, or drawing, or whatever you are animating.

The time-lapse function is also incredibly easy. Just set the time between frames, and click record. Here’s the view from my office at the start of the day. It represents about ten minutes of compressed time. (Watch for my coworkers showing up in the window reflection.) The occasional blurring of the screen isn’t a problem with the software; it was raining really hard that morning, and there were moments when the window was covered in sheets of water.

Of course, there are Windows programs that have much of the same functionality. I haven’t worked with any of them, but there is an extensive list of available products (along with a ton of other info) at the StopMotionWorks animation enthusiast website. These guys are from the school of “if a little info is good, a lot of info is better.”

If anyone is using animation software in schools (or just for fun!), let me know. I’d love to post it here.

My ASCD SmartBrief newsletter from a couple of days ago had a link to an article from the online Rocky Mountain News about the controversy brewing over the Vilas School district and their online classes. Why is there a controversy? The district only has 100 students, but has enrolled almost 2,000 students in online courses from other districts across the state. Their level of funding has quadrupled in the last twelve months as the state support for the students follows them from their own home district to the online classes.

Needless to say, the home districts aren’t really pleased. Just to muddy the waters, most of the students are enrolled through a separate enitity that runs the online charter school under a contract with the Vilas district. To some degree, the district is a front for the Hope Online Learning Academy Co-op, which contracts with local non-profit groups around the state to run its 40 centers where students can take the online classes and receive tutoring. Is this a healthy public-private partnership, or someone taking advantage of the system to make money from the public schools? It’s certainly not clear from the amount of info in the article, but there is also no clear agreement among the folks in Colorado.

My favorite quote is

“What really shocked me was that online students could drive costs” instead of saving money, said Rep. Tom Plant, D-Nederland, chairman of the Joint Budget Committee.

One of the biggest problems we have with online learning is the very mistaken belief that it will somehow be less expensive. Hopefully we can get this idea stamped out.

My second-favorite quote is

“They don’t like free enterprise. They don’t like competition,” Sen. John Evans, R-Parker, a member of the education committee, said of those critical of online programs.

I hope we can get away from the idea that free enterprise and competition are silver bullets that will fix anything, too.

Lots to think about here!

I received an email from Mark Ahlness, who is a teacher at Arbor Heights Elementary School. He uses David Warlick’s Blogmeister tool to host a classroom blogging page for his third-grade students. It’s one of the sites that we visited in our meeting yesterday, and I told our participants that part of the deal was that they had to leave at least one comment in response to a student’s blog.

I received a nice email this morning from Mark, and it read in part:

Conn, thanks so much for sending your participants our way today! There were 9 or 10 comments sent to my classroom. Each comment means so much to them, and they get so motivated to write even more. I have never seen anything
like this in the classroom!

If you get an opportunity to visit Mark’s classroom page, drop a comment to one of the students. If you want to look for other classrooms, if you go to the Blogmeister site linked above, look for a drop-down window in the upper right that lets you select a state and then select a teacher that’s using the tool. We’re pretty early in this classroom blogging thing, but I think it has lots of intriguing potential.

This is getting pretty circular, but this morning we had a nice meeting about educational blogging. I’d write more about it, but Jeff Allen from Olympic ESD participated in the meeting via videoconferencing and he already blogged about it before the meeting was over.

We looked at educator blogs, classroom blogs, and aggregators like Bloglines. We also spent a lot of time talking about the applications and implications of blogs in the school system. It’s a very wide open topic, but there seems to be some significant interest in identifying blogging systems for students (such as David Warlick’s Blogmeister) that has moderating and other protections. There is also an interesting tension between staff blogs and a district’s legitimate need to monitor communication with parents and the community.

What’s really clear is we can’t ignore blogs. They’re going to continue to be created, used, and read. We might as well use this great technology as best we can.